Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.
Some of the things I hope to say very much follow up on what Robert Baines has just said, but at a specific new university initiative level. I also want to use this time to speak about the great question before you of Canada's involvement in NATO. It's not only a millennial problem. It's more widespread across different generations.
I would like to state my four conclusions up front, then elaborate a little on them. The first is that NATO is still Canada's premier international military security vehicle to support our values and interests abroad. Secondly, Canada's operational participation in NATO is of high value to the functioning of NATO, but our influence goes down quickly if we only talk. The third point I want to make is that Canada must be a key player in defending the approaches and access to the Arctic and securing the North Atlantic. We will not be able to do this if we continue our lack of military reinvestment. In the fourth place, in a strategic contest of more and more Sino-Russian co-operation, the power gap between the U.S. and the NATO allies endangers our political security interests. It feeds American unilateralism and blurs democratic solidarity.
As you know, Mr. Chairman and members, Canada's third defence task is contributing to a stable and more peaceful world, but it does not highlight that Canada is a signatory to a collective defence organization. As a result, Canadians underestimate NATO.
In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union used its veto in the UN Security Council to immobilize any response to Soviet-backed communist governments conquering nearly all of eastern Europe. As a result, NATO was formed. In the last 65 years, NATO has been the most important international instrument for democratic peace. NATO means that liberal democracies have the political and military capacity, the military training, the standardization, the command and control framework, and thus the readiness to co-operate in military operations.
A lot of people were surprised that NATO continued after the fall of the Soviet Union, but why would it not? Why are people surprised? The price of military capacity continues to go up. The liberal democracies of NATO end up working together one way or another, so why would they re-nationalize their defence and throw away years of shared practice?
Moreover, there's more to NATO than national interests and military power. NATO's preamble states, “The Parties to this Treaty...are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” Are the eastern European states to blame for wanting to join this military co-operation and the prosperity of the EU? Would eastern Europeans really have democratic independence if they were left on their own?
The Russian government is not threatened by Bulgarian, Romanian, or Latvian NATO membership. What threatens Moscow is the spreading practice of liberal democracy. If democratic rights were all around Russia, more Russian people would ask, “Why not us?”
It was NATO that successfully addressed the conflicts in the Balkans. Canada took a major role then, and we must now invest more political, diplomatic, and economic resources in helping the Balkan area—all of it, in addition to Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro—to come into this community of democratic states.
Is NATO relevant today?
As Canadians, I want to underline that we depend for our freedom to trade, our freedom to resist dictatorship, and our freedom in global communications on the political-military co-operation of liberal democracies. NATO is just one part of that. We do not depend on the United Nations to the same extent, and we do not want to depend merely on the United States. It is crucial for Canada to have a strong international coalition of democracies with military capability.
The alternative is to only depend on our own bilateral relations with the United States. Now, we love our American friends, most of them, but we want our independence. That means we need a military that matters, not a niche force, not a humanitarian force.
Soon Canada will have 40 million people with a $2 trillion GDP. We are a very big country geographically. We have to step up. We need to build ties with our democratic friends in Asia who link us into a global framework as well.
I want to remind everyone that NATO never was a regional arrangement under the United Nations per article 53. However, after 1990, NATO undertook its crisis resolution tasks, except for one, only under direct UNSC mandate, showing that it is a power multiplier for the UN if and when the United Nations Security Council functions. In the current security environment, the UN Security Council will not function to advance democratic peace. It will not. Therefore, NATO's importance is up.
Canada needs to be a significant participant in securing the water and air approaches and access to the Arctic area as well as in securing the North Atlantic area. We need to be able to have follow-on capacity for what we do in NATO, including supplying our troops deployed in NATO. The navy and air investments for these two tasks are very demanding, and our current plans are so delayed or modest as to be nearly discredited.
I want to come back to the earlier point about a new initiative. I have started a NATO field school and simulation program at my university, and it is now inviting students from all over Canada. We engage with the Canadian Armed Forces in Canada, then we go to Brussels to the NATO headquarters at SHAPE, then we go to Latvia to watch our battle group, and then we end up with a one-week long NMDX simulation at the Naval Defense College in Rome.
It is a program whereby we're bringing Canadian university students back to this alliance, and that's where the connection is that Mr. Baines was talking about. The students see and experience the quality of our military and our diplomatic personnel, but they also see that there is really no plan B for the lack of resources and capacity.
Of all the public policy files that students learn about in our country in Canadian universities, for example, infrastructure building, food safety, environmental standards, and health care, there is nothing so dysfunctional and mind-bogglingly disheartening as reinvesting in Canadian defence capacity.
The stark reality appears to be that, short of war, Canada does not have a domestic, political bureaucratic course available to it to implement its strategic needs. Of course, the real problem is political will, and, therefore, I suggest Parliament must take a greater role in finding a multi-partisan, multi-year, financially locked-in approach to securing military priorities.
My final point is about inequality inside the alliance and the danger it poses to Canadian foreign policy. The inequality in capacity in NATO is often disguised and exploited by many allies, but a NATO undermined from within leaves Canada with poor international security options. For example, it may lead to a spokes-and-hub set of alliances between the United States and east European allies. Other nations inside NATO may be tempted to make their own bilateral political deals with Moscow, or in anticipation of the growing role of China, they may do so with Beijing.
The relative power of the United States is down, and with it, the influence and strength of liberal democracies, unless these latter help to compensate for this power. The forces against democratic legitimacy now have two superpowers behind them: China and Russia. It is NATO's task to signal to Russia, by means of capable and credible operations, that the independence and territory of the democracies are not negotiable, and that democratic development in Europe will continue.
I think millennials need to be educated through an entirely new initiative in our university whereby NATO is not only known in the sense that they can spell it out, and they can tell you what it does, but whereby students have an opportunity to experience what it is to be involved in a multilateral organization that does political-military affairs.
Thank you very much.